The Third Brother
by JoyfulSerenity
Summary: Heaven or Hell? This was neither. What it was, I wasn't sure. All I knew was the pain that had tormented me for so long had dissipated and in front of me stood an old friend, beckoning me onward. Guiding me into the unknown.


**Disclaimer:** I own nothing, you know this. I don't want to get sued.

**A/N:** This is a oneshot written for the International Wizarding School Championship. My limit was 900 words, hence the length. Required information can be found at the bottom.

* * *

It was black, the shade more oppressive than any other I had seen. It surrounded me, swallowed me up and pulled me beneath the tide. I fought, pushing through the swells of nothing and toward the surface where I believed answers lay.

I didn't understand. Gone was the battlefield, the distant cries of spells interspersed with shrieks I was afraid meant death. Gone was the unyielding floor of the shack beneath me, the scarlet that had dripped across my pale skin, staining it. Gone were the green eyes I had felt myself fall inside time and time again, tumbling amongst the memories they contained. Gone, I worried, was me.

I opened my mouth, terrified my voice wouldn't work, that I had been silenced when I needed to be heard most of all. "Hello?" It was little more than a croak, and despite the silence that stretched out around me, the question was barely audible.

The black changed then, shades of grey obscuring the darkness despite no obvious source of light. Then — just as quickly —it was white. The contrast was startling, painful against my eyes. My hand came to my face, an attempt to block it out, but even when I closed them, it was there. It was familiar. I had been here before, as a younger man, and so had he.

I opened them again, my vision settling on a shapeless form. The haze of the being was dark, different than I'd expected, and this, too, was familiar. It wasn't the nostalgia of a simpler time, an experience I'd had before, but something I had known deep in my soul all my life.

I watched the edges of it form, solidifying into the one I knew was waiting for me. Into the palest blue robes and wrinkled fingers, sparkling eyes behind golden glasses and a trailing beard. I felt a light inside me at the sight of it, a spark I thought had been snuffed long ago, back when I learned that — for me — hope was little more than a fantasy.

"Severus." He said my name with a smile, the tone one would give an old friend, and I hoped that was how he thought of me.

I felt weak here, unsure of myself. I had lost the severity of life, of my soul, and found, above all else, I was scared. My own grin trembled on my lips, the muscles of my mouth hesitant of the new movement. "Professor," I glanced around myself, at the emptiness I didn't know. "Where are we?"

"The in-between, the beyond, past the veil — whatever you would like it to be called." He, too, glanced around the vast, empty space. "I quite like to consider it Ireland, myself. An Ireland I have never known, but a home to me all the same."

My eyes narrowed, confusion falling further over me. The water that tried to drown me previously no longer an ocean, but a waterfall. "I don't understand."

Dumbledore reached out, his hand resting gently on my shoulder. I hadn't realized how close he and I had been. His words were soft when he spoke, the austerity I had known before was gone — freed by death.

"You have fought bravely, Severus. The boy that came to me eighteen years ago is not the man that stands before me. But, war is no more. Not for us."

My heart seized inside my chest. If it had been thumping before this moment it sat still inside me now and I understood. The scenery changed once more, blades of grass shooting up from the nothingness on which I stood. Roots burst across a newly formed ground, trees stretching towards a cloudless sky.

The sound of rushing water broke through the silence, carving through the stones that lay inside it. This, too, I knew.

"I'm dead, aren't I?" My voice was flat, the statement of what I already knew, that the Dark Lord had succeeded. There was the pulsing of green again, the tingle of memory. "And Harry? Is he…" I was paralyzed by fear once more. Afraid that even in the end I had failed.

"He is alive, though for how long I cannot say. He is fighting with the knowledge you gave him, but here, that's unimportant."

It gave me little comfort, though I seemed not to care. There was something about this place — this "beyond" — that was calming me. "And, you?" I found myself asking. "Never had I expected you to be the gatekeeper."

"I am not the Professor that you once knew. I am me and more. I am one with death, with life, with all the departed souls." His voice was cold, nearly something that I hadn't known, and I understood the shapeless black that had stood before me. A master of this world that wasn't Dumbledore at all.

He looked out across the river for what I felt was a final time, memorizing the shades of green that had engulfed us. "And this, to you, is home?"

I nodded. The river swam with more than fish and seaweed, but all the things that had once made me happy. That, I could never put into words.

"Then home it shall be." Dumbledore's hand pushed into me, guiding me somewhere new, towards a light I hadn't noticed. I stepped through into warmth and knew that nothing else mattered. That it never would again.

* * *

**Story Title/Link:** The Third Brother  
**School:** Illvermorny  
**Technique:** Dialogue tags and Action Beats  
**Prompt:** The Tale of the Three Brothers — [Character] Death  
**Year:** 3  
**Word count:** 907 (10% leeway)


End file.
